Abstract: Disease is the major factor that affects livestock production. Although the traditional methods of disease control played an important role in disease prevention and treatment, as the development of molecular biology and genetic engineering technology, to improve the disease resistance and health of livestock has become an important way to increase the production level through genetics and breeding technology together with analyzing the marker allele frequency differences of the candidate gene in resistance and susceptibility groups. Mannan-binding lectin (MBL) is the main ingredient to constitute human and animal serum complement lectin and plays an important role in the innate immune. This article outlines the distribution, structure and functions features of MBL, introduces the relationship between the MBL gene and diseases resistance, and prospects the potential application that MBL is used as genetic marker for livestock breeding for disease resistance. MBL is expected as a genetic marker that can produce high disease-resistant livestock varieties by marker-assisted selection to carry out the breeding for disease resistance.

Key words: mannan-binding lectin (MBL); biological function; polymorphism; disease resistance breeding